Metadata Catalogues
Contributing organisations publish metadata to the AODN by providing ISO 19115 compliant metadata, which is harvested into the primary AODN GeoNetwork metadata catalogue. The AODN catalogue provides visibility of all AODN relevant metadata. Most metadata records offer access to the described data, either through direct download or via a webpage from the AODN contributor.
The remainder of the metadata records either describe how users can obtain the data, (e.g. by the provision of contact details of the principal investigator), or simply document the existence of the data which is not currently accessible (e.g. due to the researcher embargoing it for publication purposes).
Metadata and the AODN Portal
Contributing organisations are also able to publish metadata and data through the AODN Portal, by the provision of ISO 19115 metadata which are marked up with OGC web compliant services and AODN controlled vocabularies. These selected metadata are harvested from contributors and stored in a second GeoNetwork instance that supports the AODN Portal.
Discovery and access
The AODN provides discovery and access services through three mechanisms:
- The IMOS GeoNetwork (contains all IMOS metadata and IMOS collections which are published in the AODN Portal)
- The AODN GeoNetwork (contains all AODN metadata and AODN collections published in the AODN Portal)
- The AODN Portal (primary data access point)
The AODN Portal
The AODN Portal is designed to be an intuitive and easy to use access point for accessing ocean data. All published data collections can be downloaded through the user interface. The AODN Portal is a consumer of web services including OGC CSW which is used to query the catalogue.
The AODN Portal also consumes web services defined in the metadata and it uses these to provide visualisation, subsetting and data download to end users.